


but lately i don't trust my brain

by shinelikestars



Category: Santa Clarita Diet (TV)
Genre: F/M, Light Angst, takes place in season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-23 00:46:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15594498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinelikestars/pseuds/shinelikestars
Summary: abby encounters some unexpected angst on her way to save eric. because of course she has to have a breakdown in the middle of the freeway -- as if having a zombie mom isn't enough.(a little piece reflecting on abby's thoughts as she's on her way to ramona's apartment)





	but lately i don't trust my brain

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from "Want You Back" by 5 Seconds of Summer
> 
> this is really short, just a little drabble! but i love abby and i love the relationship she has with eric, so i wanted to write a little something expounding on that fear she'd mentioned upon arriving at ramona's apartment, those scary moments when she wasn't sure whether eric was alive or not. 
> 
> hope you enjoy!
> 
> xo,  
> L

Abby doesn’t realize quite how much she needs Eric until she thinks she’s already lost him.

 

She is stuck in typical afternoon rush-hour hell traffic, sitting in the middle of McBean and watching both time and gas waste away, and it is Abby’s new definition of a living nightmare. In the period of her life she likes to label as “Before” – before her mom developed a taste for human flesh, before her dad had to worry about bigger things than getting caught smoking weed, before her parents coming home with blood on their clothes was a regular occurrence – her version of a nightmare would’ve been different. It might have entailed something happening to her parents or realizing she had absolutely no clue what to do with her life. Several years ago, her worst nightmare _had_ come true when One Direction broke up.

 

She has to laugh, albeit a bit hysterically, thinking about how stupid her worries were, back then. The boy-band singers who had occupied her fourteen-year-old fantasies probably wouldn’t be able to handle the sight of her mom chowing down on a kidney (and no, her mom won’t ever be able to convince her that it’s “kind of like how people eat foie gras, honey!” – yeah, ducks never wore clothes or had a mortgage, unlike her mother’s choice of game).

 

But then her thoughts turn back to Eric, because Eric can handle the sight of it (granted, he would swoon a bit at first, but he’s really a great sport now). _Eric_ has gracefully – well, okay, not gracefully, but he’s handled every problem her parents have ever thrown at him. He’s handled _her_ problems like they’re nothing at all. And now Eric, for all Abby knows, might be dead, or dying, or hurt. Ramona could be gnawing on his femur right now, and she’d be none the wiser, because she’s stuck in fucking _traffic_.

 

Much as she hates to admit it, she can’t contemplate a future without Eric in it.

 

Her parents would be the first to admit that she’s an independent girl. Abby has never thought of herself as someone who depends on other people to function, or even to be happy. She’s always done just fine on her own, though friends like Sarah and Emily have drifted in and out of her life, giving her nicknames like “Six Minute Abs” and plenty of good times. But the thing is, nice as all the Sarahs and Emilys have been, they’ve never mattered so much that Abby’s heart has threatened to stop at the idea of their paths ceasing to cross at some point. It’s high school, after all; the friendships you make here aren’t really _meant_ to last.

 

But Eric is different. He’s been different from the start, stumbling into her life with all his nerdy zombie knowledge and admittedly-endearing awkwardness, and Abby wants to hate that. But she can’t. She can’t bring herself to hate any part of him, except maybe for the part where he kissed her when they barely knew each other, if only because she’s thought about how she would re-do that kiss _way_ too many times.

 

Maybe if he’d kissed her a little later, he wouldn’t be stuck in Ramona’s apartment right now. Maybe Abby wouldn’t be on the verge of tears in the middle of a traffic jam. Hell, maybe even some sort of fucked-up butterfly effect would have happened, and they would have found a cure for her mom.

 

But the reality is that she _is_ terribly close to crying, and she’s still a good thirty minutes away from solving the very problem that has her like this. Which, frankly, is crazy. The last time she cried was maybe sixth grade, and _that_ had simply been a ploy to convince Frankie Andrews to get close enough to comfort her so she could (attempt to) break his arm for brutally rejecting Sarah in front of their entire English class.

 

There’s so many other things she could be crying about. Like the fact that her mom violently murdered someone in their kitchen, right in front of her, just last night. Or the fact that the victim of said murder had stalked her and followed her home, and she’s _still_ feeling a little bit creeped-out by that. Or that she never feels safe anymore, because her parents are always doing stupid shit that she has to help them fix, and any one wrong move could send them to federal prison and send her hundreds of miles away to Arizona–

 

But she’s not crying about any of those things. Nope, the reason that she’s staring down at the blurry image of her steering wheel is that she doesn’t know if Eric’s okay. He hasn’t responded to any of her texts. And she doesn’t want to say this, but she’s _scared_.

 

The Tesla behind her slams on his horn, letting out a long, loud beep that jostles Abby out of her thoughts as she hastens to get the car going again. Traffic, thank God, has finally started moving, and she’ll be damned if she’s not going to break a few speeding laws to get to Ramona’s place as soon as humanly possible. So she wipes at her eyes and grips the steering wheel so tight, her knuckles turn white.

 

She doesn’t have time for tears anymore. She’s Abby Hammond, goddamn it. She will fix this on her own.


End file.
